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Wednesday, June 29, 2016

A database management system
(DBMS) is system software for crafting and managing databases. The DBMS offers
users and programmers with an organized way to create, retrieve, update and accomplishdata.

A
DBMS makes it possible for end users to create, read, update and delete data in
a database. The
DBMS basically serves as an interface between the database and end
users or application programs, confirming that data is consistently prepared
and remains simply accessible.

The
DBMS accomplishes three important things: the data, the database engine that
allows data to be accessed, locked and modified and the database diagram,
which defines the database’s logical structure. These three foundational
elements help provide concurrency, security, data integrity and uniform
management procedures. Typical database administration tasks supported by the
DBMS include change management, performance monitoring/tuning and backup and recovery.
Many database management systems are also responsible for automated rollbacks,
restarts and recovery as well as the logging and auditing of
activity.

The
DBMS is possibly most useful for providing a unified view of data that can be
accessed by numerous users, from various locations, in a controlled manner. A
DBMS can limit what data the end user sees, as well as how that end user can
view the data, providing many views of a single database schema. End users and
software programs are free from having to understand where the data is
physically located or on what type of storage media it resides because the DBMS
levers all requests.

The
DBMS can offer both logical and physical data independence. That means it can
protect users and applications from needing to know where data is stored or
having to be worried about changes to the physical structure of data (storage and
hardware). As long as programs use the application programming interface (API)
for the database that is provided by the DBMS, developers won't have to modify
programs just because changes have been made to the database.

With
relational DBMSs (RDBMSs), this API is SQL, a standard programming
language for defining, protecting and accessing data in a RDBMS.

Common types of DBMS systems:-

Popular database models and their management
systems include:

Relational database management system (RDMS)
- flexible to most use cases, but RDBMSTier-1 products can be quite
expensive.

Columnar database management system (CDBMS) -
well-suited for data warehouses that have a large number of similar
data items.

Cloud-based data management system - the cloud
service provider is accountable for providing and maintaining the DBMS.

Benefits
of a DBMS

Using
a DBMS to store and manage data comes with advantages, but also overhead. One
of the biggest advantages of using a DBMS is that it lets end users and
application programmers access and use the same data while managing data
integrity. Data is better protected and maintained when it can be shared using
a DBMS instead of creating new iterations of the same data stored in new files
for every new application. The DBMS provides a central store of data that can
be accessed by numerous users in a controlled manner.